The Internet's Truth

            The internet world resembles a cave like in “The Allegory of The Cave” by Plato. The prisoners in the cave resemble everyone on the internet. The shadows that the prisoners are seeing and perceiving as reality are like the world we perceive on the internet. We believe that the world we are seeing on the internet is reality until we experience it in real life. When the prisoner escapes from the cave and learns the reality of the world, he is very confused and it takes time to readjust to the world as fact. In “Catfish: the Movie,” it takes time for Nev to understand that the internet reality he has been experiencing is not the true reality.

            The internet is a fast world of false realities that many people fall into. It connects almost everyone in the world to each other and information is limitless. However, with this access to information and to other people, you will find those people who are not honest and abuse the information available. Nev experienced this first hand and his brother Rel filmed it in “Catfish: the Movie.” Nev began a relationship with a woman he met online. This woman, Angela, used the information on the internet to make a fake profile to connect with Nev. She used photos, videos, music, and art that she found online to make her profile as believable as possible. Nev believed her. The profile that Nev saw was like the shadows in the cave; he believed what he was seeing and experiencing. Nev slowly began to discover the truth. Like the freed prisoner, it took time for him to understanding the true reality of the “Facebook Family.” He now helps other through “Catfish: the TV Show.” In this show, he helps people who are experiencing the same thing he did. When he tries to tell other that the online reality is not a real reality, they do not believe him. This situation is like the freed prisoner returning to the cave and attempting to explain to the other prisoners what the real world is like and that the shadows they see are not actually true reality.

            The internet acts as a vale for people to hide behind and the movie shows the truth behind those who use it. Herzog addresses the differences in ecstatic truth and absolute truth in his essay, “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and the Ecstatic Truth.” Ecstatic truth is defined as the experience of truth that brings people out of themselves. Absolute truth is the truth that is always true. The movie shows the ecstatic truth of the internet. Herzog does not agree with Plato’s idea of simple reality being the absolute truth. Herzog’s idea is strengthened with the internet and the ways it can be used that are shown in “Catfish: the Movie.”

The Holocaust and Truth

I first saw the 1955 documentary Night and Fog while taking Father Bruce’s Understanding Religion. He shows the relatively short yet impactful documentary during the unit on morality and evil before watching The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Usually in this weekly night class we would take our tests at the end of class so that students would not leave early. This night was not like that. We took our tests first because he had found that many people would become extremely distraught after watching these films, and it caused their grades to suffer. Since seeing it the first time, I find myself thinking about it often, but it was not until this week where I re-watched it with Herzog’s “On the Absolute, Sublime and Ecstatic Truth” in the back of my mind that I fully understood what the documentary truth of the film is to me. 

For those of you who have not seen the film, Night and Fog is a documentary about the Holocaust and was released 10 years after the liberation of the concentration camps. The documentary shows actual wartime images and videos taken from concentration camps along side footage of the abandoned camps. The documentary is ultimately extremely haunting and makes you question humanity’s capacity for such violence. The film shows the life in the concentration camps, including vivid images of the torture, experiments, and executions committed in these now abandoned places. 

In his article “On the Absolute, Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth”, Werner Herzog presents the idea of the ecstatic truth which comes from the greek word ekstasis meaning to stand outside of oneself. The ecstatic truth is the experience of truth that brings a person outside of themselves. Herzog argues that the only way to experience this truth is through art. The ecstatic truth Night and Fog reveals is the capacity of evil that humans can exhibit. 

The sublime is the idea that we experience things that are too vast to understand. Like the ocean, they can be overwhelming and beautiful, but terrifying in their vastness. The truth that art gives us is something that must be understood through a power within ourselves, like our imagination. Documentary truth reveals the sublime and the ecstatic truth to us. Unlike what Plato says, Herzog argues that the simple reality cannot be the truth anymore. This documentary revealed truths about the Holocaust that were unknown to everyone across the world even during the war. The image and videos recorded during the time the concentration camps were active revealed the gruesome truths that to an extent needed to be seen to be believed. 

Herzog, McDonalds, and the Truth

The film documentary Super Size Me by Morgan Spurlock brings to light some intriguing insight into the absolute absurdity behind the fast-food industry. Also watching this documentary with Werner Herzog’s speech On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth in mind, it causes me to try to identify what exactly is the ‘ecstatic truth’ or deeper truth behind this film. Herzog says that only through a state of sublimity does a deeper truth become possible. He actually calls this type of truth, “the enemy of the merely factual. Ecstatic truth, I call it” (1). Herzog also speaks of how virtual reality and digital effects have effected the ‘truth’ to the point where we cannot trust ‘reality’. In other words, reality has become a mystery.

Now to conceptualize the reality and the immensity (which is no mystery) of the McDonald’s corporation, here are some facts about McDonalds from an article published by the business insider (link on bottom) in 2012: McDonald's' daily customer traffic (62 million) is more than the population of Great Britain, McDonald's sells more than 75 hamburgers every second, McDonald's feeds 68 million people per day (1% of the World’s population), and McDonald's' $27 billion in revenue makes it the 90th-largest economy in the world.

Having these facts in mind about McDonald’s, I think it is important to pose the questions that Herzog’s asks on page seven, “We must ask of reality: how important is it, really? And how important, really, is the factual? Of course, we can’t disregard the factual; it has normative power. But it can never give us the kind of illumination, the ecstatic flash, from which Truth emerges.”So what does the film Super Size Me tell us? Does it tell us anything at all really? Is there an ecstatic flash from which the Truth emerges?

I personally believe the film reveals a truth in which frequent McDonald’s customers (like myself) didn’t really want to believe. I think many like myself knew McDonalds was unhealthy, but we did not fully understand how unhealthy it actually is. Morgan’s McExperience provides for us an actual account of how detrimental eating McDonalds everymeal/everyday is to our bodies.

But besides the fact that this film gives us an actual, informative look into the damaging effects of fast-food on a healthy human being, I really do not think this film tell us anything we don’t actually already know about McDonalds and fast food. Instead, I think what causes the film to be more startling is the realization of how many people in America are suffering from physical illnesses as a result of eating poorly. What makes it more surprising is how McDonald’s is growing in popularity throughout the world in countries (like in Europe and Asia) which are known to be healthier than America.

Consequently, I think the greatest revelation this film brings to light is about the human person, not McDonald’s. I’m not sure if Herzog would call this the ‘Ecstatic Truth’, but this truth about the human person from Super Size Me is what intrigues me most about the film. This revelation is that human beings make really bad choices (repeatedly) and our post-modern culture seemingly encourages people to make bad choices and continue on a path of poor decision-making. I don’t believe it is any great revelation that human beings make poor decisions frequently. However, if we couple the inherently horrid, decision-making human beings have with the post-modern consumeristic/materialistic culture, you have a ‘supersized’ recipe for disaster. I believe this film provides a truly, fascinating look into how more and more people are becoming victims of our consumeristic culture; a culture in which many seemingly pride themselves on comfort and easy living at the expense of their well-being.

Link: http://www.businessinsider.com/19-facts-about-mcdonalds-that-will-blow-your-mind-2012-4/#mcdonalds-feeds-68-million-people-per-day-thats-about-1-percent-of-the-worlds-population-3

The reality of it all

I had no idea what I was getting into when I started watching Grey Gardens. All I know was what I got from a short Wikipedia summary: that is was about the aunt and cousin of Jackie Kennedy living in a decaying estate in East Hampton. Needless to say, I ended up finding this documentary fascinating.

Big Edie and her daughter Little Edie were - and I can’t think of any other word for it - a wreck. They’re constantly bickering; they never wear proper clothing; their house is quite literally falling apart. And yet, somehow they make for an interesting documentary. I think this brings in the notion of truth that we discussed.

The truth of the lives of these two women is that they are no longer in their glory days. They spend most of the film reminiscing about their pasts. They show the Maysles dozens of old photos of themselves. They were glamorous and beautiful. But that was the past and the reality is both have deteriorated along with their house. Little Edie makes skirts and scarves out of anything but actual skirts and scarves. I’m fairly certain Big Edie was naked in several shots (the cameraman was kind enough to only shoot her face in these cases). The way they live now is only a poor shadow of their old lives. But for them, it’s the reality they live in. They don’t seem to completely notice their complete squalor as they sing and bicker endlessly. Their reality appears to be different from what we see in the documentary. “Of course, we can’t disregard the factual. It has normative power,” Herzog states in his speech. However, I think these two women are doing a pretty good job of just that.

The next question is whether or not we are actually seeing the entire truth. It might be the case that much of what we’re seeing is simply a show put on for the camera. The women rarely leave their house, so boredom must be a factor as well. Still, this documentary manages to show us enough of the truth for us to understand its message. The whole point is to show the odd, deteriorating lifestyle of two once-wealthy women obsessed with fame and beauty. And that’s exactly what we see. Sure, it’s only a glimpse into their everyday lives, but we see enough of it to understand that these women are falling apart. It’s both fascinating and terribly sad.

Super Size the Truth

             In the documentary, Super Size Me, Morgan Spurlock does what next to no one would ever think of doing. He eats every meal at McDonald’s for a month straight and is forced to supersize every meal if asked. This documentary displays how Spurlock’s health massively decreases over the course of the month and presents the major health risks of fast food. Overall, the documentary promotes the end of the McDonald’s fast food chain and uses the results of Spurlock’s experiment to argue their point. While this documentary was definitely eye opening to the risks of fast food, throughout it, I found myself contemplating how much of it was actually truthful. In his article, “The Absolute, the Sublime, and the Ecstatic Truth,” Werner Herzog discusses how digital effects and the media can mask what is true. He asks questions like, “What is really going on in the reality TV show Survivor? Can we really trust a photograph?” After watching Super Size Me, questions similar to these stuck with me as well. I wondered how much of Spurlock’s situation could really constitute the end of every McDonald’s restaurant in America.

            The documentary presents fast food as being detrimental to health, which the majority of people are aware of. However, the situation Spurlock puts himself into is extremely unrealistic. He eats nothing but McDonald’s everyday for a month. How many people would actually do this? While I have no doubt that the McDonald’s fast food caused the massive health problems he received at the end of the film, I question whether this particular situation can be used to constitute the closure of every McDonald’s restaurant, as no person would really ever be in a situation in which they would eat McDonald’s every single day. I feel that Spurlock and the people behind the film used this particular experiment to mask the truth, which is that when it all comes down to it, eating healthy or unhealthy is a choice human beings have to make for themselves. The simple fact that McDonald’s restaurants exist cannot be used as a scapegoat for people’s unhealthy lifestyles. While people should definitely be informed about the risk factors to health when eating McDonald’s food, I do not think Spurlock’s experiment can be used to shut the entire chain down, as the situation he uses to argue his point is not realistic at all. In his article, Herzog contemplates what reality really is, and I do not believe the situation Spurlock puts himself into is reality.  

            However, while I believe the particular experiment was not in line with the truth, I do think particular aspects of the film could have been used to give a more factual representation of McDonald’s. The film itself is used to argue that the results of Spurlock’s experiment should constitute the closure of all McDonald’s restaurants. The experiment itself is very unrealistic. However, if the film had highlighted specific aspects, as opposed to the results of the entire experiment, I feel they could have better made their point. For example, they could have focused on how Spurlock’s weight, blood sugar, and blood pressure were affected each time he ate a supersize meal. They also could have monitored how well he was able to exercise after eating a McDonald’s meal, as opposed to a healthy meal made by his girlfriend. I think the problem with this film is that it focuses too much on the “big picture” results of one experiment. In doing this, it masks the “truth,” which Herzog discusses in his article. Instead, the film should have focused more on realistic situations, such as the results of a higher calorie meal at McDonald’s or how a McDonald’s meal affects wellness, as opposed to another meal. While people do not eat McDonald’s for thirty days straight, they do eat it periodically and at times eat much larger portions than necessary. Instead of using cinema to mask the truth, as Herzog would put it, I think this documentary could have been much more effective in closing down McDonald’s or in even getting the company to make changes in their menu if they had been a bit more realistic. 

McIgnorance

          After watching Super Size Me, a documentary and personal account of the role fast food can play in overall health, lets just say I am probably not eating McDonald's for a very long time. This is a powerful, lighthearted documentary by Morgan Spurlock with a very serious message. It is basically a personal journey he goes through over the course of 30 days where he only eats McDonalds three times a day and shows the effects it has on him. Also, throughout the film different facts and current events are discussed about the food industry and the effects of it on the general population.
          One thing I noticed after watching the documentary is that for the most part I knew pretty much everything he was talking about. I mean be honest, we all know fast food is not healthy for you, yet most of us still eat. Why is this? This situation reminds me of Plato's "Allegory of the Cave," where the man who is led into the light chooses to go back into the cave to what he knows best. People know that fast food is not good for you, but it tastes so good and what are the odds it's going to kill you right? Well it will. Maybe not directly, but it can cause problems and those problems lead to more problems which cause death and body failure.
          In this case we are going to say the American public are the people in the cave. At first all they know is that fast food is cheap, fast, and fills you up. It also offers a variety of options to satisfy a multiplicity of people. And plus advertisements are literally everywhere: tv, social media, billboards, every couple miles in any direction. One thing that stuck with me is near the end where a family could not recite the pledge of allegiance, but they could recite a Big Mac ad perfectly. I was taken completely aback by this. And this documentary is 13 years old, imagine how many times bigger the fast food companies' influence is.
          The purpose of our public schooling systems is to educate. One thing we fail to educate is how to efficiently take care of yourself. Here lately there has been an emphasis on taking away physical education so there is more classroom time so test scores can increase. Who cares if you are 300 pounds if you can find the square root of 5,467,563 right? We do not have to decrease wellness education to increase book knowledge. In fact I believe they go together. We have to get rid of this systemic purposeful ignorance of what processed fast food does to us. America is the fattest country in the world. Being overweight is second only to smoking in deaths, but is closing the gap on even that. There has to come a time where we stop looking at shadows on the wall and start standing up and walking into the light.

How You Make Good People Do Bad Things

With that title in mind, I will start off with Herzog’s mention of Kant’s philosophy. According to Kant, there are certain things we experience that overwhelm us with both fear and beauty. To me, one of those is the concept of humanity. Humans are beautiful creatures who contain so much good in their hearts. They are even willing to extend a helping hand to those whom need it, but at the same time, humanity is also scary. Those same people dedicated to helping us (e.g., soldiers) are the same people capable of absolute horror (e.g., torture). How do you even begin to comprehend how they are able to stomach such acts?

This is where Herzog’s matter of ecstatic truth comes into play. In order to understand why good people do bad things, we must take a step back, outside of ourselves and our bubble, and look at the truth that experience brings us. You can automatically deem the person evil, but you are not looking at the whole experience. For example, I will look to the soldiers in Abu Ghraib. They knew the acts they committed were terrible, but they still committed them without raising objections. To them, those acts were merely an order. Now, while we cannot put ourselves in that situation, we can look to our professors for a similar experience. The professor I teach with once told the class that he says outrageous things to see what students would do. Instead of questioning him and wondering why he says such things, they write it down as logical points in their notes. If your professor is lecturing you, and you know what they said is false, how likely are you to correct them? Sure, a few would, but the overwhelming majority would not say a thing. They would be too afraid to question authority. This same logic applies to the soldiers in Abu Ghraib and other horrible places: They are merely given orders in their mind. By using this example of professors and lectures, we are able to experience ecstatic truth to understand the sublime truth about humanity.

It is easy to argue bad people do bad things because that is logical. You expect terrorist groups to kill innocent children. You expect serial killers to keep playing games. Yet, it is scary and hard for us to understand that most horrendous crimes are committed by good people. Another easy thing to point out that parallels the mystery of humanity is the Stanford Prison Experiments (for those interested, the story is here).

Ordinary men adapted harmful roles as prison guards when given the authority to do so. They were only told to “be the guard.” They did not question the fact that they were harming innocent people. To them, the prisoners deserved to be there; therefore, they deserved the isolation and punishment they received. They did not question it, because much like the Hard Body competitors and their illusions of Kmart, that became their reality. They normalized the crimes they committed. Similarly, the Nazis from Germany also fit in this category. It is easy to say that all Nazis were bad people (and they are), but we cannot ignore the fact that they had everyday lives like us. They played games with their families, had dinner parties, watched films, and even educated themselves. The scary, sublime truth is that ordinary people like you and I are capable of horrendous things we cannot even comprehend. Humanity is infinite, beautiful, and absolutely terrifying. There is a fine line between good and evil, but what is stopping someone from crossing it?

Maybe I am taking a pessimistic view on things, but the concept of humanity and evil is so easily danced around. We want to assume the neighbor we love so dearly is not capable of horrible things, but let’s be real, we ALL are. All it seems to take is an order and suddenly a new world is shoved in front of you until you experience another ecstatic truth and wake up (e.g., like Abu Ghraib soldiers hearing what they did on television). Maybe someone else can put a little bit more of a positive spin on things?